Being a proud Atheist, and a freedom loving INFIDEL AKA "KUFFAR", WE are threatened by the primitive pidgeon chested jihad boys in the medieval east.
FRACK YOU!! SAY US ALL!! Don't annoy the Pagans and Bikers,, it's a islam FREE ZONE!!! LAN ASTASLEM!!!!

Thursday, January 10, 2013

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Ankara's
Unacknowledged GenocideTurkey,
Past and Future

It is commonplace among Middle East scholars across the political spectrum
to idealize the Ottoman colonial legacy as a shining example of tolerance.
"The multi-ethnic Ottoman Turkish Empire," wrote American
journalist Robert Kaplan, "was more hospitable to minorities than the
uni-ethnic democratic states that immediately succeeded it … Violent
discussions over what group got to control which territory emerged only when
the empire came to an end, after World War I."[1]

The ethnic cleansing
of Turkish Armenia was accomplished in a variety of ways including deportations
and outright massacres. Here, Armenian deportees struggle to survive in
makeshift tents erected in the Syrian desert to which they were deported in
1915.

Bernard Lewis went a significant step further, ascribing the wholesale
violence attending the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to attempts to reform
its Islamic sociopolitical order. "The classical Ottoman Empire enabled
a multiplicity of religious and ethnic groups to live side by side in mutual
tolerance and respect, subject only to the primacy of Islam and the supremacy
of the Muslims," he wrote. "The liberal reformers and
revolutionaries who abolished the old order and proclaimed the constitutional
equality of all Ottoman citizens led the Ottoman Empire into the final bitter
and bloody national struggles—the worst by far in the half-millennium of its
history."[2] And
Edward Said, in an exceptional display of unanimity with his intellectual
foe, was similarly effusive. "What they had then seems a lot more humane
than what we have now," he argued. "Of course, there were
inequities. But they lived without this ridiculous notion that every millet
has to have its own state."[3]
Even Elie Kedourie, whose view of Ottoman colonialism was far less
sentimental, could see some advantages in the empire's less than perfect
sociopolitical order: "Ottoman administration was certainly corrupt and
arbitrary, but it was ramshackle and inefficient and left many interstices by
which the subject could hope to escape its terrors, and bribery was a
traditional and recognized method of mitigating severities and easing
difficulties."[4]
While there is no denying the argument's widespread appeal, there is also
no way around the fact that, in almost every particular, it is
demonstratively wrong. The imperial notion, by its very definition, posits
the domination of one ethnic, religious, or national group over another, and
the Ottoman Empire was no exception. It tolerated the existence of vast
non-Muslim subject populations in its midst, as did earlier Muslim (and
non-Muslim) empires—provided they acknowledged their legal and institutional
inferiority in the Islamic order of things. When these groups dared to
question their subordinate status—let alone attempt to break the Ottoman
yoke—they were brutally suppressed, and none more so than the Armenians
during World War I.

Historical
Context

An important strand in Ottoman idealization has been the charge that it
was the importation of European ideas to the empire, notably those of
nationalism and statehood, that undermined the deeply ingrained regional
order with devastating consequences to subjects and rulers alike. In
Kedourie's words: "A rash, a malady, an infection spreading from Western
Europe through the Balkans, the Ottoman empire, India, the Far East and
Africa, eating up the fabric of settled society to leave it weakened and
defenceless before ignorant and unscrupulous adventurers, for further horror
and atrocity: Such are the terms to describe what the West has done to the
rest of the world, not wilfully, not knowingly, but mostly out of excellent
intentions and by example of its prestige and prosperity."[5]
Evocative of the fashionable indictment of nationalism as the scourge of
international relations, this prognosis is largely misconceived. For it is
the desire to dominate foreign creeds, nations, or communities, and to occupy
territories well beyond the "ancestral homeland" that contains the
inevitable seeds of violence—not the wish to be allowed to follow an
independent path of development. In each of imperialism's three
phases—empire-building, administration, and disintegration—force was the midwife
of the historical process as the imperial power vied to assert its authority
and to maintain its control over perennially hostile populations; and while
most empires have justified their position in terms of a civilizing mission
of sorts, none willfully shed its colonies, let alone its imperial status,
well after they had outlived their usefulness, or had even become a burden.
Hence the disintegration of multinational, multidenominational, and
multilingual empires has rarely been a peaceful process. On rare
occasions—the collapse of the Soviet Union being a salient example—violence
has followed the actual demise of the imperial power. In most instances,
however, such as the collapse of the British, the French, and the Portuguese
empires, among others, violence is endemic to the process of decolonization
as the occupied peoples fight their way to national liberation.
The Ottoman Empire clearly belonged to the latter category. A far cry from
the tolerant and tranquil domain it is often taken for, Turkey-in-Europe was
the most violent part of the continent during the century or so between the
Napoleonic upheavals and World War I as the Ottomans embarked on an orgy of
bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their European
subjects. The Greek war of independence of the 1820s, the Danubian
nationalist uprisings of 1848, the Balkan explosion of the 1870s, and the
Greco-Ottoman war of 1897—all were painful reminders of the cost of breaking
free from an imperial master.[6]
And all pale in comparison with the treatment meted out to the foremost
nationalist awakening in Turkey-in-Asia: the Armenian.

Prelude to
Catastrophe

Unlike Europe, where the rise of nationalism dealt a body blow to Ottoman
imperialism, there was no nationalist fervor among the Ottoman Empire's
predominantly Arabic-speaking Afro-Asian subjects. One historian has credibly
estimated that a mere 350 activists belonged to all the secret Arab societies
operating throughout the Middle East at the outbreak of World War I, and most
of them were not seeking actual Arab independence but rather greater autonomy
within the Ottoman Empire.[7]
This made the rise of Armenian nationalism the foremost threat to Ottoman
integrity in that part of the empire.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Armenian population of
the Ottoman Empire totaled some two million persons, three-quarters of whom
resided in so-called Turkish Armenia, namely, the vilayets of Erzerum, Van,
Bitlis, Sivas, Kharput, and Diarbekir in eastern Anatolia. The rest, about
half a million Armenians, were equally distributed in the Istanbul-eastern
Thrace region and in Cilicia, in southwestern Anatolia.[8]
As a result of Russian agitation, European and American missionary work,
and, not least, the nationalist revival in the Balkans, a surge of national
consciousness began to take place within the three Armenian religious
communities—Gregorian, Catholic, and Protestant. In the 1870s, Armenian
secret societies sprang up at home and abroad, developing gradually into
militant nationalist groups. Uprisings against Ottoman rule erupted time and
again; terrorism became a common phenomenon, both against Turks and against
noncompliant fellow Armenians—before it was eventually suppressed in a brutal
campaign of repression in 1895-96, in which nearly 200,000 people perished
and thousands more fled to Europe and the United States.
Turkish Armenia did not remain quiet for long. By 1903, a vicious cycle of
escalating violence was in operation yet again, and two years later, Turkish
sultan Abdul Hamid narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by Armenian
nationalists. In the early 1910s, despite years of cultural repression,
including a ban on the public use of the Armenian language and a new round of
horrendous massacres (in the spring of 1909), Armenian nationalism had been
fully rekindled. In April 1913, for example, Armenian nationalists asked
Britain to occupy the southern region of Cilicia, from Antalya to
Alexandretta, and to internationalize Istanbul and the straits as a means of
"repairing the iniquity of the [1878] Congress of Berlin," which
had stipulated Ottoman reforms "in the provinces inhabited by the
Armenians." At about the same time, a committee of the Armenian National
Assembly, the governing body of the Apostolic Ottoman Christians, submitted
an elaborate reform plan for Ottoman Armenia to the Russian embassy in
Istanbul.[9]
Bowing to international pressure, in February 1914, the Ottoman
authorities accepted a Russo-German proposal for the creation of two large
Armenian provinces, to be administered by European inspectors-general
appointed by the great powers. This was a far cry from the Armenians'
aspirations for a unified independent state as its envisaged territory was
partitioned into two separate entities rather than creating a cohesive whole,
yet it was the most significant concession they had managed to extract from
their suzerain, and most of them were anxious to preserve this gain come what
may. Hence, when the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the
German-Austro-Hungarian Triple Alliance, the Armenians immediately strove to
demonstrate their loyalty: Prayers for an Ottoman victory were said in
churches throughout the empire, and the Armenian patriarch of Istanbul, as
well as several nationalist groups, announced their loyalty to the Ottoman
Empire and implored the Armenian masses to perform their obligations to the
best of their ability.
Not everyone complied with this wish. Scores of Ottoman Armenians,
including several prominent figures, crossed the border to assist the Russian
campaign. Others offered to help the Anglo-French-Russian entente by
different means. In February 1915, for example, Armenian revolutionaries in
the Cilician city of Zeitun pledged to assist a Russian advance on the area
provided they were given the necessary weapons; to the British, they promised
help in the event of a naval landing in Alexandretta.[10]
Although these activities were an exception to the otherwise loyal conduct
of the Armenian community, they confirmed the Ottoman stereotype of the
Armenians as a troublesome and treacherous people. This view was further
reinforced by a number of crushing defeats in the Caucasus, in which
(non-Ottoman) Armenians were implicated in the Russian war effort. Above all,
as the largest nationally-aware minority in Asiatic Turkey, the Armenians
constituted the gravest internal threat to Ottoman imperialism in that
domain; and with Turkey-in-Europe a fading memory and Turkey-in-Africa under
Anglo-French-Italian domination, the disintegration of Turkey-in-Asia would
spell the end of the Ottoman Empire, something that its rulers would never
accept.
Before long, the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to the kind of
retribution that had been inflicted on rebellious Middle Eastern populations
since Assyrian and Babylonian times: deportation and exile. Having been
rendered defenseless, they were uprooted from their homes and relocated to
the most inhospitable corners of Ottoman Asia, with their towns and villages
swiftly populated by new Muslims arrivals, and their property seized by the
authorities or plundered by their Muslim neighbors.

The Ethnic
Cleansing of Turkish Armenia

The first step in this direction was taken in early 1915 when Armenian
soldiers in the Ottoman army were relegated to "labor battalions"
and stripped of their weapons. Most of these fighters-turned-laborers would
be marched out in droves to secluded places and shot in cold blood, often
after being forced to dig their own graves. Those fortunate enough to escape
summary execution were employed as laborers in the most inhumane conditions.
At the same time, the authorities initiated a ruthless campaign to disarm
the entire Armenian population of personal weapons before embarking on a
genocidal spree of mass deportations and massacres. By the autumn of 1915,
Cilicia had been ethnically cleansed and the authorities turned their sights
on the foremost Armenian settlement area in eastern Anatolia. First to be
cleansed was the zone bordering Van, extending from the Black Sea to the
Iranian frontier and immediately threatened by Russian advance; only there
did outright massacres often substitute for otherwise slow deaths along the
deportation routes or in the concentration camps of the Syrian desert. In
other districts of Ottoman Armenia, depopulated between July and September,
the Turks attempted to preserve a semblance of a deportation policy though
most deportees were summarily executed after hitting the road. In the coastal
towns of Trebizond, for example, Armenians were sent out to sea, ostensibly
for deportation, only to be thrown overboard shortly afterward. Of the deportees
from Erzerum, Erzindjan, and Baibourt, only a handful survived the initial
stages of the journey.[11]
The Armenian population in western Anatolia and in the metropolitan
districts of Istanbul was somewhat more fortunate as many people were
transported in trains—although grossly overcrowded—for much of the
deportation route, rather than having to straggle along by foot. In Istanbul,
deportations commenced in late April when hundreds of prominent Armenians
were picked up by the police and sent away, most of them never to be seen
again; some five thousand "ordinary" Armenians soon shared their
fate. Though the majority of the city's 150,000-strong community escaped
deportation, Armenians were squeezed out of all public posts with numerous
families reduced to appalling poverty. Deportations in Ankara began toward
the end of July; in Broussa, in the first weeks of September; and in
Adrianople, in mid-October. By early 1916, scores of deportees, thrown into a
string of concentration camps in the Syrian desert and along the Euphrates,
were dying every day of malnutrition and diseases; many others were
systematically taken out of the camps and shot.[12]
The Ottoman authorities tried to put a gloss of legality and innocence on
their actions. The general deportation decree of May 27, 1915, for example,
instructed the security forces to protect the deportees against nomadic
attacks, to provide them with sufficient food and supplies for their journey,
and to compensate them with new property, land, and goods necessary for their
resettlement. But this decree was a sham. For one thing, massacres and
deportations had already begun prior to its proclamation. For another, as is
overwhelmingly borne out by the evidence, given both by numerous firsthand
witnesses to the Ottoman atrocities and by survivors, the rights granted by
the deportation decree were never followed.
Consider the provisions for adequate supplies for the journey and
compensation for the loss of property. After the extermination of the male
population of a particular town or village, an act normally preceding
deportations, the Turks often extended a "grace period" to the rest
of the populace, namely, women, children, and the old and the sick, so they
could settle their affairs and prepare for their journey. But the term
normally given was a bare week, and never more than two, which was utterly
insufficient for all that had to be done. Moreover, the government often
carried away its victims before the stated deadline, snatching them without
warning from streets, places of employment, or even their beds. Last but not
least, the local authorities prevented the deportees from selling their
property or their stock under the official fiction that their expulsion was
to be only temporary. Even in the rare cases in which Armenians managed to
dispose of their property, their Muslim neighbors took advantage of their
plight to buy their possessions at a fraction of their real value.[13]
Nor did the deportees receive even a semblance of the protection promised
by the deportation decree. On the contrary, from the moment they started on
their march, indeed even before they had done so, they became public
outcasts, never safe from the most atrocious outrages, constantly mobbed and
plundered by the Muslim population as they straggled along. Their guards
connived at this brutality. There were, of course, exceptions in which
Muslims, including Turks, tendered help to the long-suffering Armenians, but
these were very rare, isolated instances.
Whenever the deportees arrived at a village or town, they were exhibited
like slaves in a public place, often before the government building itself.
Female slave markets were established in the Muslim areas through which the
Armenians were driven, and thousands of young Armenian women and girls were
sold in this way. Even the clerics were quick to avail themselves of the
bargains of the white slave market.
Suffering on the deportation routes was intense. Travelers on the
Levantine railway saw dogs feeding on the bodies of hundreds of men, women,
and children on both sides of the track, with women searching the clothing of
the corpses for hidden treasure. In some of the transfer stations, notably
Aleppo, the hub where all convoys converged, thousands of Armenians would be
left for weeks outdoors, starving, waiting to be taken away. Epidemics spread
rapidly, chiefly spot typhus. In almost all cases, the dead were not buried
for days, the reason being, as an Ottoman officer cheerfully explained to an
inquisitive foreigner, that it was hoped the epidemics might get rid of the
Armenians once and for all.[14]
As the deportees settled into their new miserable existence, they were
forced to work at hard labor, making roads, opening quarries, and the like;
for this, they were paid puny salaries, which effectively reduced them to
starvation; work in the neighboring villages that could earn them some
livelihood was strictly forbidden. Water was normally brought to the camps by
trains; no springs were to be found within a radius of miles. The scenes at
the arrival of the water trains, by no means a regular phenomenon, were
heartbreaking. Thousands of people would rush toward the stopping place,
earth-jars and tin cans in hand, in a desperate bid for their share of this
elixir of life. But when at long last the taps were opened, people would
often be barred from filling their vessels, having to watch the precious
water running out on the sun-baked ground.
Independent estimates of the precise extent of Armenian casualties differ
somewhat, but all paint a stark picture of national annihilation. In his
official report to the British parliament in July 1916, Viscount Bryce
calculated the total number of uprooted Armenians during the preceding year
as 1,200,000 (half slain, half deported), or about two thirds of the entire
community. Johannes Lepsius, the chief of the Protestant Mission in the
Ottoman Empire who had personally witnessed the atrocities and had studied
them thoroughly, put the total higher, at 1,396,000, as did the American
Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, which computed the number of deaths
at about 600,000 and of deportees at 786,000. Aaron Aaronson, a
world-renowned Zionist agronomist who set up the most effective
pro-Anglo-French-Russian entente intelligence network in the Middle East
during World War I, estimated the number of deaths at between 850,000 and
950,000.[15]

Genocide or
"Collateral Damage"?

Turkey has never acknowledged any wrongdoing vis-à-vis the Armenians.
While some leaders and administrators of the Young Turks regime, which ruled
the empire since July 1908, were court-martialed immediately after the war
for crimes committed during their ten-year rule, including the Armenian
atrocities, this was done in deference to the victorious Allied powers rather
than out of true conviction. Even the newly-established Turkish republic
(1923), despite its renunciation of much of the Ottoman imperial legacy,
would not disown its arguably most heinous crime since its founding father,
Gen. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk "whatever his disagreements with the Young
Turks leaders … was after all imbued with Young Turk ideas."[16] Not only did Ankara fail to
acknowledge any intention or plan to destroy Armenian nationalism, but the
deportations and killings were presented as a natural act of self-defense
against a disloyal population. In the words of Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, doyen of
Turkish historians: "It's one thing to say that the Turks killed the
Armenians spontaneously, and another to say that, when the Armenians
revolted, the Turks, who were locked in a life or death struggle, used
excessive force and killed a good many people."[17]
Given their idealization of the Ottoman legacy, it was only a question of
time for Western scholars to adopt this narrative.[18] "The Turks had an Armenian
problem caused by the advance of the Russians and an anti-Ottoman population
living in Turkey, which was seeking independence and openly sympathized with
the Russians coming from the Caucasus," argued Lewis.
There were also Armenian gangs—the Armenians boast of the heroic feats
performed by the resistance, and the Turks certainly had problems of
maintaining order under wartime conditions. For the Turks, it was a matter of
taking punitive and preventive measures against an unreliable population in a
region threatened with foreign invasion.[19]
The distance from here to the substitution of perpetrators for victims and
vice versa is short. In Lewis's words: "No one disputes that terrible
things happened [and] that many Armenians—and also Turks—died. But the exact
circumstances and the final tally of the victims will doubtless never be
known."[20] Elsewhere,
he described the episode as a result of "a desperate struggle … between
two nations for the possession of a single homeland, that ended with the
terrible slaughter of 1915, when, according to estimates, more than a million
Armenians perished, as well as an unknown number of Turks."[21]
The nature of the conflict was of course quite different. Far from "a
desperate struggle between two nations for the possession of a single
homeland," it was a brutal repression by an imperial power of a subject
population; and while Armenian national aspirations undoubtedly posed a grave
threat to the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, there can be no moral or
political equivalence between these aspirations and their repression.
Moreover, even if most Armenians helped the Russian war effort, which they
most certainly did not, there was no military—let alone moral—justification
for the uprooting of almost an entire nation from its ancestral habitat, not
to mention those communities that were far removed from the war zone (e.g.,
Cilicia, western Anatolia, etc.). Even the Nazis, who exacted horrendous
collective punishment for acts of resistance, did not exile a single occupied
nation from its homeland (apart, of course, from their Jewish citizens,
singled out for collective destruction).
Nor for that matter is there any symmetry between the military (and other)
resources at the empire's disposal and those available to its subjects, not
least since states by definition control the means of collective violence. In
the Armenian case, this inherent inequality was aggravated by the
comprehensive disarming of the community; and while some "gangs"
may have retained their weapons, the vast majority of Armenians surrendered
them to the authorities despite their stark realization that the 1895-96
massacres had been preceded by very similar measures.
The ethnic cleansing of a virtually unarmed nation cannot, therefore, but
indicate that, in the words of Turkish-American scholar Taner Akçam,
"the wartime policies of the Ottoman government toward the Armenians
were never … the result of military exigencies" but were rather the
culmination of a preconceived design to destroy Armenian nationalism, for
which war provided the ideal pretext.[22]
Drawing on a wealth of Ottoman, German, British, and U.S. documents, Akçam
unveils a disturbing picture of elaborate planning and meticulous execution
of Ottoman Armenia's ethnic cleansing. He traces this design to the Ottomans'
defeat in the Balkan wars of 1912-13, which sealed their creeping expulsion
from Europe and convinced the Young Turks leadership, dominated since January
1913 by the radical triumvirate—minister of war Enver Pasha, minister of the
interior Talat Pasha, and minister of the navy Djemal Pasha—of the empire's
imminent demise absent drastic homogenization of the Anatolian homeland:
"The Christian population was to be reduced; that is, removed, and the
non-Turkish Muslim groups were to be assimilated."[23]
This resulted in a campaign of massacres and expulsions against the
Ottoman Greeks, suspended after November 1914 under German pressure, and
culminating in the cleansing of the Armenians. The six historically Armenian
provinces of eastern Anatolia were emptied of their inhabitants, who either
perished on the harrowing track to exile or were resettled in the deserts of
present-day Syria and Iraq. Most of the Cilician and West Anatolian Armenians
endured a similar fate.
Akçam identifies a "dual track mechanism" used for the ethnic
cleansing of the Armenians, and Christians more generally:

·A legal track, comprising official state acts
such as the bilateral population exchange agreements of 1913-14 with Serbia,
Bulgaria, and Greece, or the May 1915 decree authorizing the Armenian
deportation. Representing Atatürk's subscription to the Young Turk belief in
the need to homogenize the fatherland, the "legal" ethnic cleansing
of the Anatolian Greeks was eventually completed by the 1923 population exchange
that drove some 1.3 million Greeks out of Turkey (and about 400,000 Turks out
of Greece).

·An unofficial track, consisting of
extrajudicial acts of violence, including forced evacuations, killing orders,
and massacres. Maximum effort was expanded to create the impression that none
of these actions were ever connected to the government, both during the war
and in subsequent decades through systematic destruction of archival source
material, yet the massive documentation provided by Akçam proves beyond a
shadow of a doubt the deep involvement of the Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP), the Young Turks' ruling party—from local administrators and
bureaucrats all the way to senior members, including Talat—in the
orchestration and implementation of extrajudicial violence and massacres.[24]

Not that these findings should surprise anyone. For one thing, the
"dual track mechanism" described by Akçam has remained a lasting
feature of Turkish political life to this very day. In republican Turkey,
this phenomenon has been known as the "deep state"—an opaque
underworld where powerful elements within the state, especially the military
and security services, act in conjunction with violent extremist groups and
the apolitical criminal underworld to undertake special, illegal operations
in the political interest of the country's ruling elite. For another, the
antique imperial practice of exiling entire nations and communities has
become an extreme rarity in modern times, precisely because of its deliberate
genocidal intent to destroy "a national, ethnical, racial, or religious
group, as such."[25]
It must have occurred to the Ottoman leadership that the exiling of almost an
entire nation—over a million men, women, and children—to a remote, alien, and
hostile environment amidst a general war without the minimal provisions for
surviving the harrowing voyage and its aftermath, was tantamount to a
collective death sentence.[26]
In the end, whatever their initial intention, the Ottoman actions amounted to
nothing short of genocide.

Conclusion

Few crimes against humanity have been so widely and so comprehensively
ignored as the Ottoman Empire's ethnic cleansing of its Armenian population
during World War I.
Mesmerized by the myth of a benevolent Ottoman colonialism (in stark
contrast to their scathing indictment of the Western colonial legacy),
Western scholars and intellectuals have turned a blind eye to the
overwhelming body of evidence of Ottoman genocidal intentions and practices.
For their part, Western politicians and leaders were loath to bring the
Armenian skeleton out of the closet given Turkey's position as an important
anti-Soviet bastion and an alluring bridge to the Muslim Middle East. And
while the end of the Cold War has increased Western propensity to address the
issue—in 2005 the European parliament conditioned Turkey's accession to the
European Union on its recognition of the Armenian genocide[27]—Ankara has remained as defiant as
ever.
When in March 2010 a U.S. congressional committee passed a resolution
branding the Armenian massacres as "genocide," over the objections
of the Obama administration, Turkey recalled its ambassador for
"consultations."[28]
In his 2008 election campaign, presidential hopeful Barack Obama stated that
"America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian
Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that
President." As president, he chose to make Turkey the site of his first
overseas trip ignoring the Armenian genocide altogether in his address to the
Turkish parliament.[29]
When in December 2011, France's lower chamber approved a bill making denial
of any genocide a criminal offence, Ankara froze relations with Paris,
recalling its ambassador and suspending all economic, political, and military
meetings.[30]
With its strategic significance made more complex by recent Middle Eastern
upheavals, and the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi,
AKP) openly pining for lost Ottoman glories, Turkey is unlikely to shed this
longtime denial and own up to its painful past.Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is
professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London.[1] Robert D. Kaplan, "At
the Gates of Brussels," The Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 2004.[2] Bernard Lewis, The Multiple
Identities of the Middle East (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), pp.
129-30.[3] Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin,
eds., The Edward Said Reader (London: Granta Books, 2001), p. 430.[4] Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House
Version and other Middle-Eastern Studies (Hanover and London: Brandeis
University Press, 1984), p. 293.[5] Ibid., p. 286.[6] Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, Empires
of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), chaps. 2, 5, 6.[7] Eliezer Tauber, The Emergence of
the Arab Movements (London: Frank Cass, 1993), chap. 28.[8] For population figures, see, for
example, Mallet to Grey, Oct. 7, 1914, British Foreign Office (hereafter FO),
FO 371/2137/56940; "Turkey: Annual Report, 1913. By the Embassy,"
FO 371/2137/79138, 25.[9] See Fontana to Lowther, Mar. 25, 1913,
FO 371/1773/16941; Lowther to Grey, Apr. 5, 10, 1913, FO 371/1773/16736;
Admiralty to FO, Apr. 15, 1913, FO 371/1775/17825.[10] Ironside to Foreign Office, Mar. 3,
1915, and War Office to the Foreign Office, Mar. 4, 1915, FO 371/2484/25073
and 25167; Foreign Office to Ironside, Mar. 9, 1915, FO 371/2484/28172 and
22083.[11] Karsh and Karsh, Empires of the
Sand, chap. 10.[12] Viscount Bryce, The Treatment of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of
Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Laid before the Houses of
Parliament as an Official Paper and Now Published by Permission (London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1916), pp. 645-9.[13] Ibid., pp. 641-2; Johannes Lepsius, Der
Todesgang des armenischen Volkes (Potsdam: Missionshandlung und Verlag,
1930), pp. 301-4.[14] Aaron Aaronson, "On the Armenian
Massacres: Memorandum Presented to the War Office, London, Nov. 1916,"
Aaronson Archives (Zichron Yaacov, Israel), File 2C/14.[15] Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians,
pp. 649-51, "Annex F: Statistical Estimate Included in the Fifth
Bulletin of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, Dated New
York, 24th May 1916"; Johannes Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenian,
1914-1918 (Potsdam: Tempelverlag, 1919), pp. lxv, 256; Lepsius, Der
Todesgang, pp. 301-4; Aaron Aaronson, "Pro Armenia," Nov. 16,
1916, p. 13, Aaronson Archives, File 2C/13; Aaronson, "On the Armenian
Massacres."[16] Elie Kedourie, Politics in the
Middle East (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp.
95-6.[17] Taner Akçam, The Young Turks'
Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the
Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. xi.[18] See, for example, Stanford J. Shaw
and Ezel Kural Shaw, Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern
Turkey, 1808-1975, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey,
vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 315; Guenther Lewy,
"Revisiting
the Armenian Genocide," Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2005, pp.
3-12; Michael Gunter, Armenian History and the Question of Genocide
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). See also Michael M. Gunter, Middle
East Quarterly, Winter 2013, pp. 37-46.[19] Bernard Lewis, interview with Le
Monde, Nov. 16, 1993.[20] Ibid.[21] Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of
Modern Turkey, 3rd ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), p. 356. Interestingly, in the first and second editions of the book
(1961, 1968), Lewis described these tragic events as "the terrible
holocaust of 1915, when a million and half Armenians perished." (p.
356). In his Le Monde interview, he reduced the fatality figure to
"hundreds of thousands of Armenians [who] died of hunger and cold,"
dismissing the description of these deaths as genocide as "the Armenian
version of this event." While he raised the figure to more than a
million in the third edition of The Emergence, he still put Armenian
casualties on a par with those of their Ottoman oppressors.[22] Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime
against Humanity, p. xix.[23] Ibid., p. xv.[24] Akçam's research also reaffirms the
validity of early documentation of the Armenian atrocities whose authenticity
has subsequently been questioned, notably Aram Andonian's 1920 book The
Memoirs of Naim Bey, as many newly discovered documents echo their now
discredited predecessors.[25]Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 78 U.N. Treaty Series (UNTS) 277,
entered into force on Jan. 12, 1951, art. 2.[26] It has been argued (see Michael
Gunter's article in this issue) that the claim of an Armenian genocide
"rests on a logical fallacy and ignores the huge loss of life among
Turkish civilians, soldiers, and prisoners-of-war. … that surely cannot be
explained in terms of a Young Turk plan of annihilation." Of course, the
Young Turks' indifference to their own people's suffering and mortality does
not preclude the existence of an annihilationist plan vis-à-vis the
Armenians, just as Hitler's readiness to sacrifice millions of German lives
did not preclude his annihilationist design vis-à-vis the Jews.[27] "European Parliament resolution
on the opening of negotiations with Turkey," Sept. 38, 2005.[28] "Armenian
genocide resolution passes US Congress Committee," Voice of America,
Mar. 3, 2010.[29] "Barack
Obama calls for passage of Armenian genocide resolution," Armenian
National Committee of America, Jan. 20, 2008; remarks by President
Obama to the Turkish parliament, Ankara, Office of the Press Secretary,
Apr. 6, 2009.[30]The Guardian, Dec. 22, 2011.

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| Efraim Karsh
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